Saba Shafi

Dancing with the Daisies Saba Shafi

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness." - Robert Frost. Miles away from my home, Kashmir, in the summer of 2016, I found myself grappling with it all--a deep boring sense of wrong, with the world decidedly turning a blind eye as children lost their sights, a deep sense of anguish brewing slowly within hearts thrown off balance, a perilously potent potion of lips parched in longing and a flickering hope that translated into a powerful lump in ones throat. Armed thus, the uninitiated tread upon a path of words and metaphors, of songs and silences, of the delicately flowing gossamer pashmina that veils and reveals, plummeting through the depths of despair and scaling the pinnacles of snowy ecstasy. And in this undulating journey was born a song. A song that compelled one to keep 'dancing with the daisies.'